Technology Framework

EthicShare, built on open source software, is committed to developing an easy to use site that can be accessed by users around the world.

The overall technology framework supporting EthicShare is comprised of three core components. They are

The ETL system (Extract, Transform, Load), which provides a mechanism for EthicShare to harvest data from disparate source providers

The data schema which provides a framework for how data is aggregated, indexed, stored and accessed

Drupal, the open source content management system, enhanced with the Apache Solr indexing and search engine, for search, retrieval, and presentation and use of the results.

Within this framework, EthicShare relies on both out‐of‐the‐box functionality and extensible tools that allow for additional, original code development. Currently, a variety of pre‐existing and newly developed tools for the EthicShare project allow scholars to discover, share, assign keywords, and comment upon scholarly research in ways that reflect the needs of the evolving scholarly practice.

The EthicShare development team has begun to engage the Drupal development community. We have implemented many Drupal modules that have been created and maintained by Drupal coders from around the world (such as the Views module and the Organic Groups module). The EthicShare development team has also created a Drupal module specifically for EthicShare, called the Link Resolver Module, that we have shared with the Drupal community: http://drupal.org/project/link_resolver. The development team will continue to seek out opportunities for collaboration and shared effort with other Drupal application developers.

EthicShare has been developed using free and open source software platforms with the hope that it can provide both the business model and the technical framework for inspiring and launching similar projects for other scholarly communities.